Blair Lee finis as Gazette continues to abandon state political coverage

...In May 2013, the Gazette did a major house cleaning, laying off reporters, editors and freelance columnists. Before that it had completely shuttered its Frederick County editions.

In 2013, it dropped Barry Rascovar, whose Monday columns now appear in MarylandReporter.com and on his own website, politicalmaryland.com. Columnist Laslo Boyd now writes regularly for Center Maryland, as does Josh Kurtz, once one of the mainstays of the Gazette of Politics and Business.

Other former Gazette reporters have gone into public relations and lobbying.

Tallman had left the Gazette to be a regional editor for the start-up of Patch.com, AOL’s hyperlocal websites that once had over 50 local reporters and editors in Maryland. AOL reportedly blew over $150 million nationwide on that project, which hired hundreds of reporters and editors across the U.S. Patch.com still publishes some local news in Maryland with a skeleton crew.

In April, the Baltimore Sun Media Group, owned by the Tribune Co., purchased the Capital-Gazette papers based in Annapolis and the Carroll County Times in Westminster. This means virtually all the local dailies and weeklies in the six-county Baltimore region are owned by the Sun and increasingly share content, where once they published competing stories on the same events.

The Washington Post and the Gazette newspapers share common ownership, but as yet do not share the same stories.
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